Data Centre Strategy

An excellent digital infrastructure ensures that North Holland has a favorable business climate for media and content companies and financial business services. Netflix, Liberty Global and the BBC, among others, chose to establish themselves here. These developments generate a lot of data traffic and require a solid digital infrastructure. To manage this properly, the Province of North Holland developed a data center strategy. For this video I coördinated and created the design and cooperated with illustrator Eline Schipperen and animation studio Make Motion.

Digitalisation is having an extensive and growing impact on North Holland, for both our residents and our businesses. This development is generating increasing data traffic and demands a strong digital infrastructure. Data centres constitute an essential part of this digital infrastructure. However, they have a huge impact on the landscape and use a lot of energy and water.

North-Holland wants to minimise the impact on these elements by ensuring that data centres generate
sustainable energy where possible, use sustainable energy on real-time basis, that the residual heat (in the environment) is used, that circular design is applied in the development of buildings which blend into the landscape and that the data centres are leaders in our province in terms of energy and innovation. The first step in achieving that aim are this Data Centre Strategy and the ambition described below. The province can and will only achieve this aim in collaboration with its partners, such as municipalities, water boards and not least the data centre industry itself. It therefore expressly invites the industry to put its sustainability ambition into practice because that contributes to support for the establishment of data centres. This strategy is an important step in promoting the establishment and sustainable development of data centres in North Holland.